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An imaged Adventure
Experiemnt: #34
Venue: HDB stairwell
Date: 15 June
Time: 334pm
LabPartners: Chong Tze Chien & Lucy Davis
Medium: Installation with Tin Can telephones & Plastic Baskets
Dimensions: Variable

Tin-can telephones, "wired" together by strings, will be the centre piece of our grand experment, which will link the blue painted stairwell of HDB block number 67 with the rooftops of the spanking new Marine Parade Community Building.

And small baskets for sending messages back and forth will also be fixed onto pulleys that run from the Community Building rooftop to the stairwell on the other side. Our magnificient vision is of a web of strings through the skies between the two buildings, as we put out feelers into an unknown world of urban planning and community communications.

And perhaps we may even garner a reply.

Medium: Installation with bookmarks
Dimensions: 21cm x 4cm

'Non-invasive' bookmarks will be slipped between the pages of 50 selected library books and placed back on the shelves. The bookmarks will be shaped as elongated ellipses with rivet-holes on each end. A soft hair-elastic band will be secured through even rivet-hole so that the elastic band acts as a kind of flexible grip the book and bookmark.


The bookmarks would bear relations - either through images and/or text - (tangential, cryptic, obscure or direct) to the content/theme/title etc of the book/chapter/page. The books selected will be relevant to the theme of the exhibition: books on social constructs, ideology, critical theory, cultural studies, architecture, art etc.


These bookmark serve as 'link' - marking and cross-referencing textual events and ideas on the shelves. They could be seen as metonymic progressions, associatively looped. It is hoped that reader will take up a random tail of 'tracking' down these 'marked' books on the shelved and see connections between and within the marked pages of various books. A selection of these bookmarks will also be distributed to the public while the exhibition is on.


The concept of 'hotspots' also suggests the boundaries set up on certain issues which are considered taboo, or too 'sensitive' for the public or community to comment or enter into discourse upon. Yet these are the very zones where negotiations and reconciliations of differing perspectives within a community can be effected. Art often performs within these boundaries and the public encountering these 'hotspots' through art can enter into social, ethical or philosophical discourse on issues otherwise deemed necessary to be invisible, or even non-existent. This engagement is especially relevant when art is encountered in places other than those designated for the 'display' of art i.e. the gallery or 'artspace'.

50 books amongst thousands - hotspots might very well be a case of the chance encounter with the individual leader. Here in the library, through the very private act of reading, a discursive, hopefully pleasurable conversation between the reader, book and artist can take place without the self-conscious awareness of having to isolate the experience as an encounter with 'Art'.

Medium: Outdoor Installation
Dimensions: Variable

Don't let your dreams fly by.

Medium: Acrylic Windmills with Text (30)
Dimensions: 40 x 60 cm each

On a quiet day when the wind is still, remove your lime-green tinted glasses and read between the lines. You may hear your own thoughts.

Number of works in series: 5
Medium: Charcoal on Paper
Dimensions: 104cm x 61cm

I am interested in commenting on thing, places and situations around me, especially those which deal with changes over time, history and space. This current series focuses on the rapid transformations which affect an individual such as myself. I have adopted the generic shape of an HDB block of flats as a symbolic element to convey this comment.


By re-rendering the images into simplified units whose latent contents can be amplified into issues of social significance, the abstract and minimal drawing somehow conceal much of what has happened throughout the years. The mundane is deconstructed; however, they have all undergone a timely process in doing so.


At the environment around us develops quickly into uniform structures, containing no history, and therefore no identifying characteristic, it creates problems for people like myself, who are continually searching to fit into a niche where we can live ourselves our own way. We are all individual - each one with our own identity; however, we are at the same time discouraged to be ourselves, and are instead offered pre-shaped forms which we must somehow fit in. We are either never at the right place at the right time or are simply not moving fast enough.


Why are we pushed into a system whereby we are forced to look only to the future, without having the time to reflect on what we have at present, to fully understand and appreciate the current moment?
How much restless energy is contained in each of these mundane forms, we do not know. I am waiting for the day when all around is silent, beautiful and still - a product finally completed and waiting only for its timely and overdue appreciation.

Medium: Strip lights with running text
Dimensions: Variable

Speed seems to have taken over; we count the seconds between each minute, which will get us there quicker: cab, bus or MRT? We are efficient usually and when others are not, we can wait our turn watching TV screens where Mr. Bean reruns hopefully numbs us to the amount of time we are wasting. We have access to infinite websites around the world at mind-blowing speed, we are global, but first I wait for the lift, the salesgirl, the moment when ERP is not in use.

Medium: Installation with four coffee tables
Dimensions: 2.06M x 0.51M, 2.17 x 1.19M, 2.23 x 0.5M, 2.09 x 0.57M

RE-NEW

These are 4 projects of renovations to existing terrace houses for new owners. They reflect an ongoing trend of social mobility among certain groups in Singapore which is related to notions of individualism and practices of consumption. A highly mediatised link, this relationship between lifestyles and the living environment is one of continuous renewal and reinvention. In such a situation, ideas of the domicile and domestic and also renewed. The home as a place to nest, to leave traces of inhabitation, takes on a different context and meaning.

In our thinking and practices as architects with respect to this phenomenon, we looked for clues and devised design strategies from the actual processes of renewing these houses. Our interest was not in conceiving ideal models but rather to appropriate from the concrete possibilities offered by particular situations. This engagement with the potentiality of various notions of living and also with the many parties involved at different stages of the process were seen as creative and productive opportunities.

COFFEE TABLE PLANS

The bias towards the operations, the present-tational, as compared to re-presentational qualities of the different processes formed the method of working. An example would be seeing the drawn architectural plan not solely as a scaled representation of the house, but as a process of researching different possibilities from certain perspectives allowed when working on a plan. This recognition of the scene or context for working in is continued in the exhibition; the Coffee Table Plans project is an attempt to engage with the various aspects of displaying and reception of these 4 projects.

Again, immediacy and presentational qualities are sought. Different media, scales and the materiality of text, images, drawings and plywood table suggest different layers and processes. Linking all this fabrication is a process of correlation, specific to each project, connecting the text to the image to the presentational format and so on. Similarly, our interest in engaging with the viewer in the premise of the Marine Parade Community Library leads us to the idea of appropriating the new lifestyle section where coffee is served. Just as we discuss and make plans over coffee at the table, it may be appropriate to set up the architectural plans an stories on the coffee tables for this exhibition.

Medium: Mixed
Dimensions: Variable

In today's environment, we are coping with transition from an industrial world to a post-industrial, electronic world. Transition is a form of communication that communicates difference. It is a fight for relevance and perhaps even towards shaping an identity. Transitions involve human complexities and are often exemplified by the behaviours of mystics, schizophrenics and artists. An artist's quest for difference is in fact a quest for integration. Some say it is supposed to promote a political agenda, or to be critical and rebellious, or even to transcend the social and political context in which it was made. Arts, for me, is a right-brain activity. It aims to integrate the unconscious and conscious processes, sometimes saving people by providing an experience of beauty. Style is a means to attract and sometimes elicit memories (from new insights into reality to the hypocrisies of the social order). Aesthetics are incidental to underlying expression.

Medium: Soap
Dimentions: Variable

The act of cleansing one's hands is a daily ritual and through our daily rituals we negotiate our own history.

Medium: Mixed Media
Dimensions: Variable

The construction of Escapes - the emergency exist, the fire escape, secret tunnel behind the wall etc posed a most beguiling context for exploration of the theme of 'encounters' and 'imagined boundaries' within the ideological spaces where individuals in a community interact. Rather than working to construct a 'livable' space, this project is a surreptitious construct of/for paranoid, claustrophobic/agoraphobic and anomalous individuals whose existence is possible only close to or within these interstitial/heterotopic spaces where the probability for escape from so-called 'livable' spaces is pre-configured.


This collaborative project between myself (fiction & sound etc) Khiew Huey Chian (installation) and Adam Collins (sound design) seeks to compromise and complicate the idea of 'escape' in the circumstance of it being an essential feature in any blueprint for a building.


Initially, we intended to seek out an actual fire escape or emergency exit within the building and intervene in the purpose and function of this architectural feature. Another possibility we considered was the construction of an escape in another site where escape is not seen to be necessary - where it might even be considered an obstruction, a kind of 'paranoid construct' within an otherwise comfortable zone. A version of this concept has become the option taken as the former plan to work within an actual fire escape is understood to pose too many logistical and safety problems.


The work is an interdisciplinary intervention with the concepts behind the architecture of escape through poetry/fiction recorded into speech/sound and an actual construction-installation of an 'alternate route' on the main stairway leading down into The Necessary Stage's space. The construction will be made of white lycra stretched over a wooden structure. Eight speakers will be mounted along the length of the wall behind the lycra at ear-level. Through these speakers, the recorded performance text will be heard. Four different tracks will be played over the four CD players - Whispered, sung, voice-synthesized. The text lingers around ideas of descent, delay, desire-to-linger operating as friction to the simultaneous desire-to-escape - a 'delay system' of seduction and suggestion.


The white space within will be lit with pink fluorescent lights which will create a surreal, deceptively calming, anxiety-deferring evironment.


We hope the sensory experience within the constructed environment will raise questions on the notions of fear and paranoia, safety and reguse, exile and marginality - and of cours, 'escape' - Susie Lingham 

Medium: Video Installation
Dimensions: Variable

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